Abravanel, Isaac

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Abravanel, Isaac

(1437–1508) a medieval philosopher and biblical commentator. He
fled from Portugal to Spain to escape a sentence of death in a supposed plot against the
king; in 1492, with the expulsion of Jews from Spain, he was forced to flee again and lived
in Venice. His works include commentaries on the Torah and the Prophets, as well as
philosophical works that followed, and were partly intended to correct, Maimonides. His
biblical commentaries were, unlike most medieval commentary, not verse‐by‐verse or
word‐by‐word, but were concerned with larger passages united by a single theme; he opens
each unit with a set of questions that he answers in great detail. In philosophy he
insisted on the primary importance of religion and wrote against efforts to explain
biblical events in naturalistic terms; he also opposed efforts to formulate a set of
dogmatic principles for Judaism.